


Manic Space Butt Friends Enjoy Their Dog Wizard

by bogged



Series: Nubile Young Celebrities [1]
Category: Actor RPF, American Actor RPF, British Actor RPF, Disney RPF, Harry Potter RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-04
Updated: 2009-10-04
Packaged: 2017-10-04 12:46:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bogged/pseuds/bogged
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first of this weird Nubile Young Celebrity 'verse wherein, post-Potter, Dan is for some reason living with Zac in a beachside LA home. After a five year silence I decide it might be fun to write drug fic again. Plus, a friend said "electronic gay space opera" at me and this is how it parsed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Manic Space Butt Friends Enjoy Their Dog Wizard

**Author's Note:**

> I do not know or own anyone discussed herein, as you could probably have figured out on your own, so please do not throw the book at me for defamation of character. Thank you!

_"She loves you, but not the way you love her. No molecular-level longing on her end.   
She doesn't experience temporary retardation in your presence, as you do in hers."  
—Ron Currie, Jr., Everything Matters!_

That Saturday was like every other weekend in July. The day held promise, looked gorgeous, and stank of a damn good time.

Zac was standing out on his back porch. An ocean breeze slinked through the California-grade summer heat and ruffled his hairline. The air felt soft as Wonder Bread. After standing a while, he turned and went back inside, closing the sliding screen door behind him. Dan was sitting in the kitchen, having finally woken up. It was 1:30 PM.

"Mornin'," Dan said around a mouthful of hot cereal. His laptop was open in front of him and he was skimming through the news headlines on the BBC's website.

"Afternoon," Zac corrected. "Got home late last night?"

Dan smiled and swallowed another spoonful, but did not look away from the computer screen. "Nope. Pretty early, actually, some idiot couldn't hold his own and tried to start a fist fight with the bartender so we decided to call it a night as he was a bit preoccupied and we didn't feel like waiting around for someone to be punched to order drinks. After I came back I just couldn't sleep. Your country is too hot."

Zac always enjoyed how Dan referred to America as _Zac's_ country, even though Dan'd been living in Los Angeles, in his guest room no less, working on various projects for the past year.

"I don't think eating oatmeal is really cooling you down," he said.

"Well, I like _this_ sort of warm, you know, that innard sort of warm. What I dislike is being warm and sweaty and awake at five in the bloody morning. They're completely different warmth sensations and cannot be judged similarly," Dan said. He looked away from the screen and met Zac's eyes, his eyebrows raised as if to say _So there_ or _Would you care to argue this point?_

Zac shrugged and walked out of the room. After living with Dan for almost a year, he'd learned some conversations were better left to be carried on without him. He flopped onto his couch, letting his neck go completely slack. He was staring at the ceiling. To his right, he could hear Dan's laptop snapping closed, the chair skrunge against the linoleum, the skin of his bare feet softly slapping the floor and the clink slank of the plastic bowl and silver spoon hitting the sink. Dan ran the tap for a minute and Zac heard the distinctive sound of water swooshslipping in the sink.

"Is the dishwasher clean?" Dan asked. Zac couldn't see him, not even through his peripherals, but could imagine from experience that Dan was standing cautiously in front of the machine, hand stretched out and tensed, as though the dishwasher might fill him with volts if he guessed wrong.

"Is the light on?" Zac asked back.

A pause and then, "Oh. No. No, it's not. That means it's dirty, yes?"

Zac closed his eyes and listened to Dan rearranging the dishes so he could fit his bowl and spoon in the top rack. He sighed. If he were a more responsible adult, Zac would have gotten up and started the dishwasher himself, would have done it two days ago when the thing started getting really full. He couldn't ask Dan to do it. The kid never had a dishwasher growing up, claiming his parents believed in hand washing and their kitchen was too small and it was an English thing, which seemed to be his umbrella excuse for anything Zac found unusual or disconcerting about Dan's behavior. When Dan first moved in, Zac had been annoyed at having to start and unload the dishwasher every time, but his attempts at teaching Dan the unbelievably simple art of arranging one's dishes and pressing the start button had been futile at best. It was like trying to teach your grandma to use the Internet. There's no way something that easy could be so incomprehensible; Dan was obviously being dumb on purpose. Whatever, though. He went above and beyond in all other roommate arenas and looked amazing in pajama pants and always had good weed, so Zac learned to stop minding and start loading.

Speaking of weed, "Hey Dan?" Zac began.

"Yes?" the response was loud and in Zac's left ear. His eyes popped open. Zac must have zoned out there for a minute, because he didn't notice Dan's sitting down next to him on the couch at all.

"Can I borrow some weed? I want to make a couple joints before I go skating today, but I'm all out. I'll pay you or just give you some when I get more."

"Yeah no problem, mate," Dan said as he flipped through the TV Guide too fast to be actually reading it. "I was actually thinking about staying in and smoking, anyway. You know, making a day of it. I've been DVRing this Science Channel series about space so, that needs watching."

"Awesome," Zac smiled. He lifted his head up off of the couch and rubbed his palms on the thighs of his shorts. "Let me just go get my smoking hat."

+++

Zac's smoking hat was dark gray and smelled like rot. He was pretty sure it had been hand knit by overweight, middle-aged Peruvian women in brightly-colored tunics, but as he could not remember where or when the hat came to be in his possession, this was mostly speculation. It had never been washed.

"Do you... do you ever think that possibly your hat is harboring mold?" Dan asked, looking at Zac's head with genuine, puppy dog concern.

"Not really," Zac said. He held a lit joint between his teeth as he began rolling a second. He inhaled, but it had gone cold so he put the joint on the ashtray sitting between Dan and himself. "Where did you find coffee-flavored papers?" Zac smacked his lips.

"Oh god, I don't even remember. I've had those for a while," Dan said, drawling the last word. He'd smoked a bowl by himself and had reclined his portion of the couch long ago. He allowed his head to loll to the right as he observed Zac's rolling skills. "How do they taste? They've not gone rotten, have they? Can that even happen? I don't know."

Zac chuckled and finished creating his second joint, licking the paper horizontally from end to end. "Tastes pretty good to me."

+++

"Whaaat are you even—I don't, I mean, I don't even know what you're saying to me right now. I hear what sounds like English, but it's not making any sense."

"Oh come off it, you know you would watch that movie."

"Would not."

"Would too."

"Would _never._"

"You're trying to tell me that you would never, ever watch a remake of _The Brave Little Toaster_ set in Soviet Russia, on Sputnik?"

"Yes, that is exactly what I am telling you."

"What? Why? Why do you hate this?"

"Because it's dumb. And it doesn't make sense. What is a toaster doing on Sputnik? They don't have electrical outlets on spaceships, especially not in the 1950s. The toast wouldn't even stay in the slot when they went anti-gravity—"

"They have little holder things—"

"—_And_ the crumbs would float everywhere. It'd be a big mess."

"Well, I'm going to write it. Once you realize how brilliant I am, you'll come round and then you'll be begging for partial rights. If you beg nice enough I may consider you for a bit part."

"Too kind."

"That's more fucking like it. How about you hand us that bowl then, good chap?"

"You are so weird."

"Cheers."

"... so, what're you calling this cinematic tour-de-force? _Crime and Toaster Strudel_, subtitled _In Soviet Russia Adventures Have You_?"

"Ohhh, that's a good one. I'll have to write that one down."

"Jesus Christ."

+++

The west coast afternoon progressed as a strange and beautiful mystery, progression being foreign and labyrinthine all on its own. Sometimes you began in one place and could clearly see the path laid out before you, every step color-coded with a check box to the left. And then sometimes you started off on your feet, lost your balance along the way and found yourself in an alternate universe where everything was exactly the same, you were exactly the same, but the people around you began to act odd and pull at your consciousness. They tossed around in your good sense, making a mess. This was how Zac found himself sitting cross-legged on the floor, a plate of waffles on his lap and Dan's face buried in the curve of his neck.

"You smell like you were just born," Dan whispered. "What do you think about that?"

After a moment and a bite of waffle, "I think we shouldn't have smoked that last bowl."

+++

You know, making out was also funny to Zac. It was maybe the most subjective sex practice. For example, Zac drew a solid line between kissing while rubbing and mouth to genital touching, with the latter being definitively beyond the realm of making out. He had known people who would disagree, who would staunchly argue that actual penetrative sex was the only thing not considered making out, but Zac thought these people were sort of slutty. A blowjob is a blowjob is a blowjob. French kissing is making out. For a second example, what Zac and Dan were doing was definitely considered making out.

"Mrrmm, wait, what?" Dan pulled away, one hand on Zac's shirtless chest and the other on the floor. They had never made it back up onto the couch and Zac could feel a few crumbs digging into the skin on his back, moist from the heat and from being pressed firm beneath Dan's compact weight. His smoking hat was beginning to make his scalp sweat.

"Um, I don't remember saying anything,"

"Oh. Thought you did."

Dan moved further away, removing any bodily contact between the two of them. Cool air sank onto Zac like an apron of lead. He attempted to sit up and failed, pathetic.

"Do you feel okay?" Zac asked, not really sure why that seemed the specific thing to ask.

Dan was silent. Zac's breathing stiffened. Him and Dan had done this a couple of times before, but always under one condition: not while sober. This rule had never been specifically stated, but the first and second times they had made out until they were clawing at each other, desperate with heat and need, they had both been plastered. The third time it happened they were high, just like now, the fourth time. Four make outs in a year is really not so much when you think about it, but they never talked about it once sober and Zac had no clue where Dan would place on the Kinsey scale. Monday he would bring home a girl from the pub and then Tuesday Zac would catch him kissing a French Canadian art student named Marcel in the darkened hallway of a house party. Zac had just assumed bisexual, but it was weird that Dan didn't talk about it, at least not like Zac talked to him about being gay. Most of Dan's friends were gay. Some of Dan's friends were _really_ gay. He talked unabashedly about sex with anyone who had something to say on the subject, managing to successfully toe the line between talking openly about himself and bragging. But he wouldn't talk to Zac, not about this. Everything else in the fucking world, yes and at length. But not this.

"I'm fine," Dan said after a long while. "I was just thinking about Daft Punk."

"Oh," Zac sighed, rolling his eyes. Dan wasn't upset or uncomfortable, he was just stupid and high.

"What if," he began. "What if, you know how they're all into space? And astronaut helmets and robots?"

"Sure." Zac rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He'd had something like an erection not three minutes ago. It had felt good. He wanted that back, but didn't think he could use being high as an excuse for rubbing himself off in the middle of the room.

"What if Daft Punk made an opera?"

Slowly, Zac lifted his hands from his eyes. Dan was lying on the floor on his stomach, maybe an inch away. His eyes looked like marbles, cold and empty and glass. Still, his hair was mussed and obviously had not been brushed in at least a week. Since he hadn't needed to go into work since Wednesday, his jawline was rough with stubble. Zac noticed a bead of sweat forming on the back of his neck, right below where the small, coarse brown hairs ended in a point. His chin was resting in his upturned palms. It was pretty cute.

"Like what kind of opera?" Zac asked.

"I dunno," Dan mumbled. He rolled onto his back and extended his arms straight up. He watched the dust and smoke particles swim through the light between his fingers. "A space opera. They could play lovers in their big gay space opera."

Zac laughed.

"They'd likely convert it into an anime," Dan continued. "Everyone would buy it and Pitchfork would give the soundtrack an 8.9 and the internet would think anime was really cool for like, three months."

"I'm pretty sure the internet thinks anime is really cool already," Zac said. "Have you ever even been on it before?"

"The internet? Yeah, once or twice."

"Brave New World, huh?"

Dan's grin was humongous. "O, Pioneers!, yourself."

"Um," Zac had reached the end of his explorative literature lexicon. "Something about the Oregon Trail."

The skin around Dan's eyes shriveled like an old vegetable when he laughed. Zac had never noticed this, but then he'd never been so close to them before. It should have been unattractive, probably would have been if this pot wasn't so stank and he wasn't still so high that his limbs felt like they'd been chopped off and replaced with someone else's buzzing hunks of flesh. He hadn't even felt his arms bend or his legs shift to support his weight as he crossed the valley between their bodies. He'd never kissed any part of Dan's face except his lips and cheeks, but he liked this new adventure. He liked finding these islands of uncharted skin, soft and a little stale from being inside all day, and recording them in whatever brain lobe specialized in sensual cartography. Zac liked to embark.

+++

It was just after midnight. They had opened the screen door and all the windows, letting the walls of their house serve as sails pushing them forward into Sunday, into sobriety, into friendship again. Everything as planned, everything unfurling exactly to their preconceived expectations.

"I don't think I'm high anymore," Dan said the moment his show went to commercials. "I can actually focus on what these people are saying without being worried their skin is melting off their faces. Don't they all look like they have really loose faceskin?"

"Here we call that look Old and Flabby Science Teacher, Never Gonna Get Laid." Zac scratched at the hair tucked behind his ears. When he pulled his fingers away, they felt a little greasy. Zac could not at the moment remember the last time he'd washed his hair.

"Hmm," Dan considered this as he bit the remaining portion of his pineapple popsicle clean off the stick. Zac was jealous; he always slopped that last bite all over himself. "I like it. I'll allow it to happen."

Zac chuckled around his own just started popsicle, fruit punch. He knew this wouldn't last forever, that eventually Dan would move out. He thought about how he had wanted to go skating, how that had seemed like the thing to do today. Maybe Dan would never move out, just like he never went skating. Maybe Zac was still a litle high.

"Right, time for bed then," Dan stated and then nibbled on his lower lip. Zac was pretty confident Dan did not realize how often he did that. "Good night."

And then Dan leaned over. He lifted his left hand and pressed his palm against Zac's cheek just enough so that their skins could feel one another. Dan kissed Zac and his lips tasted like pineapple and sugar syrup. They were cold at first, but so were Zac's, so they helped warm each other. When Dan's lips opened Zac could taste the wood on his tongue from biting into the popsicle stick. Zac put the fingers not holding the popsicle, dripping and pink and stinging beneath his fingernails, on those same coarse hairs on the nape of Dan's neck. He had a flash of himself licking the skin beneath those hairs, of the way that would make Dan exhale and his fingers, among other things, twitch. It was only a moment, but it was enough for him to start getting hard.

"Maybe you should go to bed," Zac said, breaking the kiss, unsure of how sober Dan actually was but still feeling uncomfortable with his partial erection so close to parts of Dan's body that were still foreign.

"Oh," Dan said, a little too loudly. He instinctively looked downward and then immediately turned to face the television so that he would not have to look at any part of Zac, who felt like an ass. An ass wearing thin shorts who had something like an erection, which was quickly fading. This could only be more uncomfortable if his life was a Youtube video and Zac was being forced to sit next to his mother while she watched it with an elderly person who didn't understand and couldn't hear anyone clearly and kept asking questions about the plot.

"Right, then," Dan said. "Good night again."

He shut the door behind him. Zac sat still for a moment before looking outside and deciding he would very much like to be out there, encompassed by something that was not his own living room. And so out he went.

Zac bit into his popsicle.

He decided he needed a beer and threw the mass of sticky sugar out over the side of the porch, where it would become covered in sand and, come morning, be fought over by the bees and the ants and the smaller coastal birds.

+++

Zac woke up on Sunday afternoon with a headache. Immediately his memory was punched with every detail of the day before. He decided it was not the heat or the beer or the weed that made his skull ache, but his own gargantuan foolishness.

"Blugh," he said.

After lying motionless for a few minutes, Zac heard Dan moving around downstairs. Ignoring his hunger and need to piss, he decided he did not feel like coming out from beneath his covers just yet, warm though they were. His laptop was on his nightstand. He opened it and logged into gmail, hoping for good news.

The first message was from Dan. Zac checked the timestamp: _about three hours ago._ There was no subject and the only part of the message he could see said, "Hiya, so I've been thinking..." Zac inhaled deeply, his heart jolted like a tire in a pothole. He clicked.

_Hiya,_

So I've been thinking all night and I've finally settled on something I'm happy with. What do you think about possibly combining the Russian Brave Little Toaster idea with the big gay Daft Punk space opera anime idea and calling it something like 'Manic Space Butt Friends Enjoy Their Dog Wizard.' I reckon we could bring this to fruition using aliases, so if it backfires (ha!) our images will not be tainted.

Get back to me on this soon, you sleepy little wanker,  
You know who this is, I live downstairs and I kissed you last night and maybe you thought I was still high, but I wasn't and it was all rather enjoyable, don't you agree?*  
x

(* It's Dan. I'm** the answer.)  
(** You should wake up soon. I've made more waffles. Wake up wake up wake up.)

+++

The sweat glands beneath Zac's arms did not know they would have to work so hard this afternoon. The pulse in Zac's heart did not know itself to have ever been louder. The skin of Zac's body did not know it could be so flushed.

The corners of Zac's mouth did not know they could reach so high.


End file.
